This issue doesn’t manifest itself on one of my PCs and I regularly use it to edit audio mp3s and WAV files using Audacity.
The mouse literally glides across the screen when I select an audio waveform file on the screen to select and edit any section of audio.
On my other PC (this one); when I do the same thing, the mouse cursor moves across the screen in a much more jittery way and the speed of the mouse is very slow.
I’m able to select the audio fine on the screen. Having selected it, it takes an entire age for the mouse cursor to go from one side of the PC screen to the other.
And the mouse also jumps and is erratic across the screen when a live recording is made of audio from the Internet.
What are the specs for the problem computer and it’s display?
Is there some improvement if you run Audacity in a smaller window rather than full screen?
When Audacity encounters a machine with limited horsepower, it has to decide what is the most important and do that first. Other tasks and processes are left until the machine has time. In Recording, capturing the work is the most important thing, so writing the progress video to the screen is left until later. In Playback, editing takes priority, so the screen comes first and the actual sound may or may not be pure.
Audacity, last I checked can’t use multiple cores, so the machine isn’t as powerful as you think.
On my other PC (this one)
This machine isn’t up to the work or is too busy doing other things. Real time production isn’t easy. Nobody will notice if the machine takes a split second too long to display a spreadsheet or print a letter, but that’s deadly when you’re trying to do real-time work.
You can take this upside down. A good test for machine speed is try to do audio (or video) production on it.
Have you done the speed/health tests? When was the last time you defragmented this machine? Never? Is all your recording done from the internet? Does this machine have the same internet speeds that the other one does? Are you connecting via WiFi? How many others are trying to jam into the same service?
Are the machines on cloud storage? Audacity doesn’t like that very much. External drives? That can cause problems.
Both machines are identical as they have the same processor.
The only difference is that the first machine has an Nvidia GT610 video card.
I always close down all background processes, defrag the hard drive and an error check on the drive before I record on this machine.
So is it a processor limitation?
Would an i5 processor be better?
I5-3570K?
I’m playing back the recording I made and there’s a noticeable skip in the recording.
Any other ideas please?
(I’ve only noticed this happening after a new build of Windows on a brand new Samsung Evo 1TB SSD after my last SSD gave up the ghost.) It didn’t happen before that at all.
Now you’re asking - I rarely use Windows and I’ve not done this in years. If I recall correctly, you right click on the “audacity.exe” file in the “Programs” (32-bit Windows) or “Program Files (x86)” (64-bit Windows) folder, then click on the “Compatibility” tab. The option should be in there… I think
There’s not much difference between the GT610 and GT710, so I doubt that is the problem, though drivers can make a significant difference. Perhaps worth checking if one machine is using newer drivers than the other.
